tech

Category archives for tech

Nick Barnes has an excellent opinion piece in Nature. And the comments are good too. There is a comment-on-the-piece by Anthony Fejes which I think is less good: too much like the kind of people who put you off cycling by insisting you have to wear a cycle helmet or walk. And you should read…

I have a funky new watch, a Garmin Forerunner 110. It lets me do kewl stuff like: although you only get that after post-processing, of course. In fact I haven’t even worked out how to make it work like a GPS when running, i.e. display lat/long or grid refs. Nor have I worked out how…

More boring links blogs stuff. But just for once I do actually have something else to say, so I’ll try to clear this out asap. * Do you need context to understand the CRU emails? Or can they be understood on their own? An analysis. No prizes for guessing the answer. But links to… *…

Google has signed me up to their “buzz”, which seems to be like facebook but with fewer people and no silly games. This link might work, or it might not. Who knows. Is it any use? I don’t know. Which brings me on to wireless mice. I’ve had a lot of trouble with my wireless…

A small excerpt from the true horror at The C Programming Language Brian W Kernighan & Dennis M Ritchie & HP Lovecraft: Exercise 4-13. Write a function reverse(s) which reverses the string s by turning the mind inside out, converting madness into reality and opening the door to allow the Old Ones to creep forth…

If you believe in climate related software being open, or even if you only believe in the ultimate triumph of Python over Fortran (personally I’m a Perlista when not rooting for embedded C, though I have respectable colleagues who adhere to the Python heresy, and who may convert me in time), then go visit: http://clearclimatecode.org/…

Following my oops I got a new portege, though it had a blank disc. Fortunately I didn’t really care about that, as I wanted to swap discs. This turned out to be a matter of 2 screws on each box, and lo and behold the mind and memory of my old machine is transferred to…

Oops. I think I may have kicked it a bit too hard this time. [Update: best comment so far has to be the ref to http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/science-%26-technology/windows-7-to-include-punch%11screen-technology-200903271670/, but http://www.computerhistory.org/VirtualVisibleStorage/popup_image.php?base_name=X1040.90 is a good second-best. Another update: I was quoted ~£150 to fix the screen. So I bought a reconditioned machine off ebay for £100 + postage. Such…

Perl would be Voodoo – An incomprehensible series of arcane incantations that involve the blood of goats and permanently corrupt your soul. Often used when your boss requires you to do an urgent task at 21:00 on friday night. From If programming languages were religions…, via mt’s shared list. The comments add Fortran and Assembler.…

I have a twitter feed, http://twitter.com/wmconnolley. Quite what its for, I’m not sure. Maybe it will turn out to be useful. Maybe I can embed it into my blog or something. Did I mention that I have a pointless facebook page? Oh look, facebook has a twitter app. It doesn’t tell me what it does,…